Issue #8: Genevieve Roth
"We are aggressively and unapologetically committed to using every tool and skill we have to make the world better than it was."
Hello + happy International Women’s Day!
It feels very fitting to be publishing this interview on IWD. I had the incredible opportunity to interview someone who has inspired me for the longest time - Genevieve Roth. Genevieve truly epitomizes what it means to harness creativity to make the world a better place, and I am so grateful that she took the time to chat with me for this issue (and am equally excited for you to read what she has to say!) Her energy is unmatched, and it made me reaaally wish that this was a podcast instead of a written newsletter - talking with Genevieve feels like you’re chatting with your new best friend but also the most wise, thought-provoking and inspiring leader on the planet.
Before we hop into the interview, I can’t publish this issue without acknowledging what’s happening in the world right now and express my support and solidarity for the Ukrainian people. Directly across the street from me isn’t another apartment building - it’s a Ukrainian church. Yesterday morning after their service inside, the congregation came out onto the street and sang together, holding candles and their flag. Hearing them sing, and watching many of them openly sob while they did, was incredibly moving and heart-breaking. Today while walking home I noticed they have since placed some photo frames on a small table out the front of the church - photos of their family members in the Ukraine. They’re raising money to send back, which I donated to, but I want to share some organizations that you can donate to if you’re interested and able. This link is regularly updated with fantastic organizations doing important work on the ground, including a few that are focused specifically on getting aid to women and children. I encourage you to do what you can, even if just something small.
Chloe
A morning chitchat with Genevieve
Genevieve Roth is the Founder and President of Invisible Hand, a social impact and culture change agency, and the Senior Strategic Advisor to Archewell, the organization founded by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Working at the intersection of social impact and narrative change, Invisible Hand has created campaigns, strategies, and activations for clients including Archewell, PBS, The Obama Foundation, The XQ Institute, and The Girl Effect. With a lifelong commitment to gender equity, Genevieve previously served as the director of creative engagement for the 2016 Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign, the executive director of special projects at Glamour magazine, and the producer of the Glamour Women of the Year Awards. She proudly co-founded The Girl Project, Glamour’s philanthropic initiative in support of girl’s education and continues to support women and girls in her work.
Yes. She really has done all of that. For real. Now let’s hop into our chat.
You juggle a lot. How do you make sure that it all gets done and you don’t burn out?
Ok, first, we need to file this under, ‘do as I say, not as I do’ because I am still finding my own balance here, but here is what I think: You have to know what conditions produce the best, most productive you, and then you have to prioritize creating those conditions. When I used to travel for work when I was younger, I would take red eye flights and book the cheapest hotel I could find. I won’t do that anymore, because the exhaustion I feel diminishes the quality of the work I can provide and the way I can show up. I need a hotel with a good bed, black-out shades, and solid exercise options nearby. This isn’t me being a primadonna, it’s me protecting the things that make me good at the job–ensuring that I can bring my best brain to the work, no matter where I am.
I was listening to my friend Elise Loehnen’s podcast the other day and she said (maybe quoting someone else) that you have to vibrate higher than whatever it is you are dealing with. That really resonated. I think that if you are going to be working on high-stakes projects or juggling a busy career and family, you have to figure out how to manage it not through blunt force, but with real care and insight for what you need to thrive. Busy, big lives are totally possible, but if we let the busy happen to us, instead of us happening to the busy–that’s when you’ll get swallowed and burn out.
So first of all, I just wanted to quickly ask - did I read that you lived in Australia at some point?
Yes, I did! I lived in Sydney and it was a transformational period of my life. I loved it. Changed my coffee order for life.
You were working in magazines at that point, right? So I guess my next question is about your actual career path. You have a super interesting journey where you were in magazines, then you did Hillary for America, launched Invisible Hand, now are also advising for Archewell - could you just tell me a bit about this journey?
I know it seems all over the place, but, to me, there is a clear through-line. I was born in a small town in Alaska into this fabulous family that was always out in the wilderness adventuring, doing exciting things. This was waaaaaaay before the internet and we weren’t a big TV family. We were library people. Everyone in our family always had a few books going at once. My parents were frugal, but they always splurged on things like subscriptions to Highlights and Cricket (which was my fave.) All of this is to say: I suppose if I’d had different parents, my upbringing could have given me a limited sense of the world, but because of all of the reading, I always felt the full breadth and size of the world, and all of its possibilities. The moment I realized that someone did that–told stories and put together books and magazines– for a job, and that was like oh. done.That’s what I am going to do. I am going to tell stories that make the world big and complex and nuanced for everyone. And I think it’s what I’ve been doing, in my own way, ever since.
And was that from before college? Like, did you know in time for college?
Yes. 100%.
So did you choose some related degree?
I did. I had a funky start to college because I’d been an athlete in high school and an injury my senior year sort of changed my prospects. I wound up studying music my first year but my sophomore year I was almost pathologically career focused. I transferred to Emerson for my undergraduate degree because they had the top program in the country for publishing and media. I was totally focused on what I would do after college–to, I think, the detriment of what I did during college. In some ways I wish I would have put myself on a leafy, academic campus and taken lots of classes that had nothing to do with my future career. I had the rest of my life to be professional.
You were a woman on a mission.
I really was. I thought I would work in books, but as I learned the industry more I realized I was more of a magazine person. I wanted to work with what I consumed, and I read so many magazines at the time. I loved how quickly you could see the impact of what you’d done. I loved that if we took someone people were curious about - a celebrity, a great thinker, an athlete—and connected them to a cause or an issue, you could really impact change. It worked. It’s not that simple anymore but at the time, it truly was. We could raise money, we could raise awareness. I watched it happen in ways large and small every single day.
Using people as a vehicle. I love that.
Yeah, in a way. I think it’s how I met myself as a philanthropic and impact thinker. Everything I’ve done since is applying that same premise–that good stories and good storytellers can impact positive change–in different fields.
On Secretary Clinton’s campaign, we were working to increase knowledge of the issues, to register people to vote, to motivate people to get to the polls. On the Women’s March we were fighting back–taking up space in the narrative and telling the world that what was happening wasn’t ok with us. But they are songs from the same hymnal–use culture, and culture makers–to try to make the world better.
At this point Invisible Hand hadn’t launched, right?
No, but it is the moment where Invisible Hand gets the twinkle in its eye. Here’s the truth: I took a several hundred thousand dollar pay cut to leave Glamour and go to the campaign. I was fortunate to be in a position where I could do that. I didn’t have a family that I was supporting and I had been doing well as a single woman for a while. But a year-and-a-half in, the coffers were running low. I needed money, and I needed help. But I was afraid to say I needed anything. And women like me–like a lot of the women who read this newsletter, I bet–do not obviously present as someone who needs help. And so I was a little stuck.
And then something amazing happened. I started to get phone calls from women–most of whom had worked on campaigns before—asking me if I was open to work. The conversations were highly transactional and deeply loving. It was right down to business: “Ok lady. I know you need to find your next thing, and you will, but in the meantime, let’s put some money back in your bank account. Here are three ways you can help my company right now and here is how much money I can pay you to do it.” Those calls saved me. They taught me that I could consult and, ultimately, that I could start Invisible Hand. There are no words for how grateful I am for those ladies.
I now do this for other women all the time. Any time there’s a big transition–like after the 2020 election or if there is a big layoff or something, I reach out and say, listen, do you want to park your car in our lot for a little while? Invisible Hand will give you a job, and I know you’re only going to stay for three months but that’s fine. Let’s help each other out. Because that’s what happened to me. Pay it forward and all of that.
And then how did Invisible Hand come about?
One consulting gig led to another and before long, I had more work than I could do on my own, but I was still noncommittal. Then I had a consequential call with Tina Tchen, who was Michelle Obama’s Chief of Staff. She introduced me to a man called Maneesh Goyal, who offered to incubate the company for a year, which kind of de-risked things. By January of 2018, we were official, but it still took me a while to feel like I had my own company. We had clients–big ones– and an office and so many of the trappings of a real business, but I had a lot (like a lot a lot) going on in my own life, and so none of it felt very real. I was newly with the man I would marry, we were pregnant and renovating an apartment (which is a great way to tell you want to marry someone, btw.) In the middle of all of that, I spent several months in Boston doing a Fellowship at Harvard. It was just a really wild, intense time. By the time my daughter was three months old I was kind of able to look up and say, “Oh, OK. There’s a real company here.”
So now, how would you describe the work that Invisible Hand does? Social change, meets story telling - what kind of work do you guys take on?
Invisible Hand is a social impact and cultural change agency. What we mean by that is that we believe that culture and culture makers have a powerful capacity to make the world better, and we harness that potential to drive change at scale.
We work in two basic categories. The first is what I would call our creative services work. So whether you’re Planned Parenthood and you want to do a campaign about the abortion bans, or you’re Instagram and you want to help teens navigate the platform while supporting their mental health, you call us. Sometimes we’ll just build you a basic philanthropic program, but most of the time that program is tied to some kind of storytelling or cultural product–a social media campaign, a video, etc. We also do a lot of strategic consulting. This is the more below-the-line internal work for companies or individuals, to help them plan out their impact strategies at a very fundamental level.
Some of my favorite work we do is in the community engagement space–we work to bring stories and change to people at a very grassroots community level. I love that work because it brings me back to the roots of my journey–the girl in Alaska who just needed good information from trustworthy sources to help make her small world big. And we are good at that because while we have corporate and agency experience, most of us were organizers first. It helps us to show up in the right energy, and to make sure that the correct and most impacted perspectives are in the room. When we do our outreach, we aren’t just saying, “Hey, this big company wants to pay us to build you a voter engagement program. Instead, we can say, ‘hey, we’ve marched with you, we’ve been in this work with you for a long time. Let’s build something great together. What do you need, how can we help?
We have, of course, a deep, deep commitment to inclusivity and equity–to being able to interrogate our own work and smoke out biases. We do a lot of strategy and relationship connect-y type of work in this area that’s hard to talk about but really fun to do. Like we work with some big technology companies with something called Responsible Innovation. Basically what it means is they will be building a new product and they bring us in to help them solve for unintended harm. So, like, ‘ok you’re going to build a sales platform that is going to be used all over the world. You need to talk to disabled people in India, you need to talk to military veterans who are coming back and trying to figure out how to start businesses. You need to see how easy these tools are to use if there isn’t great internet access, like there isn’t in many parts of rural Americas. And because we’ve been organizing–often in these very spaces–for so long, we have the relationships to connect them to the right people to help them smoke out bias and unconscious harm. Saying that we are “connectors” kind of makes me wince, but that’s a lot of what it is. And I love it.
We are aggressively and unapologetically committed to using every tool and skill we have to make the world better than it was.
You advise some pretty famous people– is that independently or as part of your work with Invisible Hand?
I don’t give specifics about who we work with. But I love our clients. The through line is that every person and company we work with has the ability to impact culture change at scale. That’s what I love. At Glamour, when we wrote about Malala, and I knew that because so many people were interested in her - we were going to be able to bring the importance of the issue of girls’ education to many more people than if I’d been doing that story without her. I love working with people who have the opportunity to get big stuff done. But also, and this is important to say - especially for the young women who might read this - It’s tricky. I named my company Invisible Hand, and a big part of my ability to do my job depends on me being trusted and discreet. It is never too early to learn that. I don’t mean not to take credit for your work or to hide in the background– not at all. I mean the instinct to know when something is your story to tell and when it isn’t.
What is one thing you tell every mentee?
Ask for more money. Always. When it comes to mentorship, I tend to focus on tactics. If you are looking for big picture inspiration, I’m not the person for that. There are lots of people who can do that. I get into the details. Let me see your contract. Tell me the specific steps you are taking to advance a conversation with a client–I get into the minutia so that I can offer very direct, actionable advice. I will also tell anyone who asks exactly how much money I made at different phases in my life. I believe transparency is the best way to smoke out bias and make sure that we are getting what we deserve.
I also think it’s important to know that the skills you need to be good at the early phase of your career are not necessarily the ones you need to be good at the latter phases of your career. Understanding the difference–and making sure you are honing the skills you need at every phase in order to advance–is often the key to advancing. Being an ace assistant and being a trusted creative executive often require very different genius zones. But if you can’t figure out how to be good at the early jobs (and choose to believe, for instance, that it is because you are too creative and cannot be stifled like that) that can keep you from the opportunities where you will really thrive and shine.
Final question. Who is one woman you’d recommend people following on social media?
The first that comes to mind, because we were talking about mentorship, is my mentor - I have many, but I was extraordinarily lucky to be mentored by Cindi Leive who was the Editor-In-Chief of Glamour and now runs a so-so-so cool women’s media collective called The Meteor. She is a tremendous curator of things. Also, Jess Morales Rocketto is a sleeper hit. Really exceptional policy commentary but also–and this is a new thing for her–sartorial and image commentary that is just *chef’s kiss*
Zerlina Maxwell helps me make senes of the world. And she takes not one iota of shit, which I appreciate.
Bye, and take care!
I hope you click out of this window feeling as inspired as I felt following our conversation. Genevieve is a truly one-of-a-kind individual and leader, and I want to thank her so much again for taking the time to chat given her crazy busy schedule!
If you love the sound of Invisible Hand, I have news for you - THEY’RE HIRING. Head here to check out the gigs going and apply apply apply!
Thanks for joining me for another issue - I’ll be back again soon. Whether it’s morning or evening for you, please take care of + be kind to yourself.
Chloe